Best Vacuum Sealer Under $500

Cabela’s only has a 90 day warranty these days. Weston’s warranty is 1 year. I think LEM is 1 year too.

$200 foodsaver and $300 in bags

I found one of these on sale for under 400.

LINK

Been working fine.

I've had a Weston Pro 2300 for 2 years now and love it. It saves so much time from my old Foodsaver.

If you're willing to spend $500, I'd buy neither of those. I'd spend that money to get a chamber type vacuum packer (assuming you have the room for it).

A chamber type is superior in almost every way to the usual consumer grade FoodSaver type of sealer where the bag of food hangs out in open air and only the mouth is exposed to vacuum. The main selling point is that you can do wet food in a chamber sealer because the entire bag is exposed to vacuum, sealed, then the vacuum is broken. Since the entire bag and sealing strip are inside the vacuum chamber, there's no pressure differential anywhere to push soft or liquid food out of the bag before sealing. The strip type sealers you are looking at pull a vacuum on only the inside of the bag with the outside of the bag exposed to atmospheric pressure, so it'll "suck up" liquids and can only vacuum pack fairly dry things.

Plus, chamber type vacuum sealers don't rely on that texture that's on the inside of foodsaver type bags. Those foodsaver type of devices have a soft gasket and rely on clamping pressure to get a good seal around the mouth of the bag so the vacuum chamber doesn't just suck air from the room instead of the bag. Since it's squeezing on the mouth of the bag, that texture inside the bag exists to keep small air channels inside the bag open so it can work. A chamber type doesn't squeeze the end of the bag until it's time to apply the heat to make a seal because the whole bag is inside the vacuum chamber. The upshot is those foodsaver type bags are expensive. With a chamber type sealer, you can use pretty much any food grade type of plastic bag instead of the expensive foodsaver bags. They're cheap as hell and you can pick up all kinds of sizes and wall thicknesses based on what you need.

Also, if you get a chamber type, look at the ones with inclined floors or inclined inserts to go inside the chamber. The slope will hold the bag at a slight angle when you're packing things like soup to make them easier to handle and keep from spilling versus a flat floor model.

That's the biggest drawback of them. They're not small appliances. They're appliances.